A team feedback tool called Relay claims to cut staff churn by 66% and increase profits by 20%, and its approach is simpler than you might expect: replace the annual engagement survey with a weekly pulse that takes less than a minute to answer. The platform, now at release 3.1.2, delivers anonymous feedback from employees to leadership in real time, with analysis that surfaces trends and recommends actions based on a global dataset of similar organizations.
The core idea is straightforward. Traditional engagement surveys happen twice a year. By the time results arrive and leadership acts on them, months have passed and the problems have either worsened or become irrelevant. Relay measures every week instead, tracking changes in sentiment and engagement as they happen rather than in retrospect. The company argues that biannual surveys are "flatlining" and that continuous measurement lets organizations iterate and pivot at the pace of business.
How the feedback loop works
Relay finds people where they already work. The platform supports multiple input channels, including desktop, mobile, and messaging integrations, so team members can respond quickly regardless of their role or location. The single output channel is a consolidated view for leadership, with analysis that distills responses into the most critical actions.
Anonymity is the design constraint. The platform removes identifying information from responses, so employees can speak candidly without fear of reprisal. The company frames this as "anonymity in, honesty out," arguing that removing bias and risk from the feedback process produces more actionable data than surveys where respondents担心 their answers might be traced back to them.
Each week, the platform delivers a Monday morning briefing to leadership inboxes. The briefing summarizes the most important feedback, highlights emerging trends, and recommends specific actions. The goal is that a manager starts their week knowing what issues to address before they surface in meetings or performance reviews.
Global benchmarking and analysis
The platform mines a global dataset to provide context for individual organization results. Benchmarks are broken down by industry and business type, so a creative agency can compare its engagement metrics against other creative agencies, not against manufacturing firms or healthcare providers. The analysis includes tone assessment, trend identification, and category-level recommendations.
The benchmarking data also captures the impact of specific interventions. When an organization implements a change based on feedback, the platform tracks whether engagement metrics shift in response. This creates a feedback loop where leadership can see which actions actually moved the needle, not just which ones felt like they should have.
Stakeholder groups extend the scope beyond internal employees. Product feedback, supply chain knowledge, and client experience can be linked to staff engagement data, revealing connections that would otherwise stay hidden. A product team might discover that customer complaints correlate with a specific team's low engagement scores, or that supplier delays are creating internal friction that shows up as declining satisfaction in a particular department.
The claimed results
The numbers Relay cites are specific. A 66% reduction in staff churn. A 20% profit increase through the most highly engaged teams. A 68% average weekly response rate sustained over years, not just weeks. The company positions these as evidence that the platform is not a digitized version of traditional word-document surveys, but a different category of tool entirely.
The 68% response rate is the metric most directly under the platform's control. Annual surveys typically see declining participation over time, especially when employees perceive that nothing changes as a result. Relay's weekly cadence and rapid feedback loop are designed to maintain engagement by demonstrating that responses lead to visible action. The Monday briefings and point-to-point action recommendations are the mechanism for closing that loop.
The churn and profit figures are harder to attribute to a single tool. Relay positions itself as one component of a broader engagement strategy, not a standalone solution. But the company argues that the combination of anonymity, speed, and benchmarking creates a feedback environment that traditional surveys cannot match, and that the organizational improvements follow from better information flowing to the people who can act on it.
Who uses it
The primary market is creative agencies and professional services firms, where talent retention directly affects client relationships and project quality. BBDO, one of the world's largest advertising networks, uses the platform and describes it as playing "a vital role" in maintaining their internal culture. The testimonial from BBDO's Head of People and Experience emphasizes simplicity and impact: the tool is straightforward in functionality but produces measurable cultural change.
The five-minute setup claim targets organizations that have tried and abandoned engagement tools because the implementation overhead was too high. Relay requires no integration with HR systems, no employee database import, and no administrator training. The platform generates a feedback channel, and the organization populates it by inviting team members through the channels they already use.
For engineering teams considering how to measure and improve their own engagement, the approach is worth examining regardless of whether Relay is the right tool. The core insight is that frequency and anonymity matter more than survey length or question sophistication. A short, anonymous weekly check-in that leads to visible action produces better data than a comprehensive annual survey that sits in a spreadsheet. The mechanism for acting on feedback matters as much as the mechanism for collecting it.